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>> Thursday, September 30, 2010

David McElhatten in american press (1994) about CD-i: "1994 was our year to prove CD-i was a viable games platform by bringing over other titles and doing them better on CD-i (Litil Divil, Lemmings). Now we are ready to move beyond that, and put our own mark on games with original titles. One of those in the works from Philips Media Games is due from its new Tribal Media co-venture with top effects firm R/GA: "City Golf" is a game set in New York that will feature a real golf engine and a real New York flavor. The firms are working with architects to create the 3D setting in order to get everything just right. If you hit a shot off the Chrysler Building, we want it to react appropriately."

Nice interview with David McElhatten was published in american Billboard magazine of 1994. he talks about the planned bundled CD-i releases with an audio CD including the soundtrack of the game, like Philips did with Burn:Cycle and The 7th Guest.
David McElhatten was the president of Philips Media Games (1994-1996). David: "Music will be the key to Dead End, a Los Angeles based racing game due in the second quarter of 1995. Philips plans to get a major act to provide the music for the game including new material. Philips is shopping for music for several CD-i projects to get 'limited editions' including an additional audio CD as an exclusive package.

This is the first official 0.53 boot screen, it's no mock-up from me :). The release of the 0.53 Beta CD-i Emulator is coming close and we actually don't know a lot of details as with the extensive release of the 0.52 version. Cdifan: "Today I resumed working on the input record/playback code to get it towards its final specification for this beta. [It is needed] to get the feature usable for extensive compatibility testing, which is a goal of this beta: it should be possible to exchange input recordings that reproduce crashes or rendering bugs, even when they require some time to reproduce. Emulator state snapshots would make this even better, but that is too much work for now.
The cdifile dumping code will not be released with this beta, there's too much unfinished code in there. I will attempt to finish this tomorrow, but it's just barely achievable..."
We'll eagerly following all the news available around the new CD-i Emulator and report more when it arrives. Read more technical details on his blog here.

>> Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Today, cdifan posted he "did some housecleaning for the upcoming beta, which he is still hoping to release before the end of this month."
cdifan: "I decided to keep the current somewhat buggy MPEG decoding stuff in the beta, which meant that I had to clean up the MPEG ROM detection logic so that it actually works. The MPEG ROM detector will now use the supplied "dummy" xmpeg.rom file if it cannot find another recognized ?mpeg*.rom file. If it does find such a file, the DVC type will now be displayed in the CD-i Emulator title bar" Check out details about his MPEG emulation right here.

>> Saturday, September 25, 2010

Gir Draxa: " is it me or does anyone else have CD-i flashbacks seeing the new playstation move controller? Guess you gotta have balls (light up ones at that) to revisit the phallic controller days of the CD-i. "

>> Saturday, September 18, 2010

It's no secret I think the main theme of Litil Divil CD-i is the absolute most creative and lovely song in a CD-i game. Unfortunately Gremlin didn't put the sounds in a CD-i Audio format like SPC Vision did with their excellent CD-i soundtracks of The Apprentice, Lucky Luke, etcetera... So now my CD-i player is not regularly connected to the TV set anymore, I can't easily listen to these great soundtracks....but then I found out you great guys even use Youtube for these soundtracks too! Apparently there are more crazy people who love it: Check out the original main theme of Litil Divil below.

>> Friday, September 17, 2010

A Quote by Philips Media HQ: "You have to remember the whole climate for CD-i was so different in America. Not to get on a pedestal, but having gone to school in Europe as a kid (Paris) and having lived in London, I was far more internationally savvy than most in the Philips US organization. While everyone was tyring to jump off the CD-i ship in America, after the first year or two of tough going in the marketplace. the Philips Media Games group, was putting out more titles than every before - titles that featured to really exploit the Cdi as a great games machine, giving a real arcade experience within a certain class of games, such as Dragon's Lair, Space, Who Shot Johnny Rock, Mad Dog McCoy etc. along with the funding we did on Atlantis, trying to crack the real time 3D with the push from PRL:and then the transition to a new team we had in Dorking (new team, new location - nothing to do with the old Dorking).
I would often come to Eindhoven and put on large demonstrations of CDi along with the recently deceased Emiel Petrone (who worked with Jan Timmer in the early days to get CD audio accepted as a format and who later pushed the DVD initiative forward and was until recently working hard on Blu-Ray) Emiel and I would get on stage in the Evulon (the mushroom building) and in semi Hollywood fashion both entertain and demonstrate all of our great software. I was more the straight man - he more of the comedian."

>> Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Welcome to CD-i!

Welcome to the wonderful world of Interactive Dreams. You've just come to a warmhearted place all dedicated to the Philips CD-i. With attention to detail and quality, 2015 should see the rise of CD-i as a Retrogaming platform. For many CD-i has gone as a relative obscurity had it not been for the intervention of websites like The Black Moon Project and Interactive Dreams. Hopefully we're doing our bit to set the record straight along with all the other great CD-i projects.

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Do you have tips on what to post about CD-i? Can you help us with screenshots, videos or reviews? We'd love it when you share it with us! Please email us at interactive [dot] dreams [at] gmail [dot] com, thanks in advance!